A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy...Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and-this matters most-intensely ponderable. -Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review This is what literature is meant to be. -Anthony Burgess Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style...The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece. -Anthony Thwaite, Observer Extraordinary...Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time. -Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid. -John Leonard, The New York Times Highly enjoyable...An intriguing plot...Ferociously inventive. -Walter Clemons, Newsweek Astounding...Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius. -Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' -Paul Gray, Time Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state-and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture-rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.